McDavid in a class with Gretzky
Star becomes only second player to win a pair of Art Ross trophies by the age of 21
They can’t take the scoring title away from Connor McDavid but the NHL MVP is a different story.
McDavid was excited to find out only he and Wayne Gretzky have ever won two Art Ross trophies by their 21st birthday and that he’s the first player since Jaromir Jagr 17 years ago to win back-to-back scoring races.
But two straight Hart trophies? Does the Edmonton Oilers captain think he should win again because he’s the scoring champ with 108 points, six more than Philadelphia’s Claude Giroux, and he had 39 more points than his nearest teammate Leon Draisaitl and had 84 even-strength points?
Or should it be New Jersey’s Taylor Hall or Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon because they willed formerly bedraggled teams into the playoffs with 90 plus points?
“Obviously, it’s a different position for me to answer that,” said McDavid. “I don’t want to say anything that holds me back but don’t want to say anything that will boost other guys. There’s so many good players, so many who had good years. Honestly it could go to anyone, and you’d have no complaint.”
McDavid knows voters like players on teams that make the postseason or be very close to it, but with a cast of candidates, way more than normal, it’s a rare, crowded field.
Maybe McDavid will be No. 2 on every ballot of five names, voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers Association and he’ll still accumulate enough points to win. Regardless, the scoring race is his. “It’s really special to do what Wayne did, the only other guy to do it,” said McDavid. “Pretty cool, one of the things I’ve done where I could say ‘wow!’”
And doing something the thirdhighest scorer ever, Jagr, did four times in a row from 1997-98 to 2000-2001 when he got his name on the Art Ross was a pinch-me moment for McDavid, too.
“Another pretty cool name to be looped in with,” he said. “I’ll take it, it’s fun to do it (win the scoring again) and obviously it’s a credit to my teammates, especially down the stretch where it was pretty tight.”
McDavid would much rather have seen the Hall of Fame’s Phil Pritchard in his white gloves carrying the Stanley Cup onto the ice Saturday than hugging the Sedins at game’s end because he wants his name on that trophy badly.
“The individual stuff doesn’t drive me though, it’s the team. We want to win,” he said.
But Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who found himself on McDavid’s left wing for the last month of the season and thrived there, knows McDavid’s furnace burns red-hot when it comes to achieving individual goals like Gretzky, even if the Oilers team goal was far from being reached.
“He’s a team-first guy but we’re all competitors and Connor’s feisty,” said Nugent-Hopkins. “He wants it whether he talks about it or not.”
McDavid’s goals jumped from 30 to 41. He finished with 274 shots, 13th best in the NHL, 23 more than last season. His shooting percentage was 12 per cent in 2016-17. It was 15 per cent this year.
He shot more but he’s still 81 shots back of Alex Ovechkin’s 355, which led the league as usual.
“I found ways to score goals late in the year (26 in 29 games since
It’s really special to do what Wayne did, the only other guy to do it. Pretty cool, one of the things I’ve done where I could say ‘wow!’
Feb. 1). Scoring in this league isn’t easy, you don’t take it for granted,” he said. “I worked on my shot to score from distance, especially on the power play.”
If the league’s worst power play with just 31 goals in 82 games had been even middle of the NHL pack, McDavid probably would have had another 15 points. As it was, he had just 20 PP points.
Hall had 37, for instance. But that’s on McDavid, too. The power play runs through him.
“We threw everything at it and weren’t afraid to mix it up,” he said. “Down the stretch it got a little better but there were days it was horrible.”
Going to the world championship for a third time, this time in Denmark, will be nice because you’re not putting your skates away but it also signifies you’re not in the NHL playoffs.
It’s the Miss Congeniality Award, in some ways.
“It’s not where you want to be playing in May but it’s also special to be able to represent your country and try to do something special with a group of random guys,” he said. “I remember my first year (coming out of junior) when I went we won a gold medal in Russia and my first year playing in Edmonton I went and we won again. You don’t forget that.”